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Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy;1 July 20, 1933) is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the southern gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize2 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses (1992), he won both the U.S. National Book Award3 and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God have also been adapted as motion pictures. Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 20054 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.5 Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth,6 and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying".7 In 2010, The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. McCarthy has been increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.8 Contents hide * 1 Writing career ** 1.1 Current projects ** 1.2 Archives * 2 Personal life ** 2.1 Family * 3 Awards * 4 Film and television adaptations * 5 Published works ** 5.1 Novels ** 5.2 Short fiction ** 5.3 Screenplays ** 5.4 Plays * 6 References * 7 External links §Writing careeredit Random House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. McCarthy decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher he had heard of". At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962.9 Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for the next 20 years. In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the Sylvania as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europebefore landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.10 In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself.10 Here he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973), based on actual events. Like''Outer Dark'' before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree, which he had been writing on and off for 20 years,11 was finally published. Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, McCarthy wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles; in a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison 's Beloved and Don DeLillo 's Underworld. McCarthy finally received widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award3 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, completing the Border Trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came[clarification needed] The Stonemason, McCarthy's second dramatic work. He had previously written a film for PBS in the 1970s, The Gardener's Son. McCarthy's next book, No Country for Old Men (2005), stayed with the western setting and themes yet moved to a more contemporary period. The Coen brothers adapted it into a film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally. McCarthy's next book, The Road (2006), won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction;2 a 2009 film adaptation was directed by John Hillcoat, written by Joe Penhall, and starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Also in 2006, McCarthy published the play The Sunset Limited; he adapted it for an HBO film (airdate February 2011) directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, starring Jones opposite Samuel L. Jackson . In 2012, McCarthy sold his original screenplay, The Counselor, to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road.12 Ridley Scott directed, and the cast included Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz. Production finished in 2012, and it was released on October 25, 2013, to polarized critical reception.[citation needed] §Current projectsedit The Guardian reported in 2009 that McCarthy was at work on three new novels.13 One is set in 1980s New Orleans and follows a young man as he deals with the suicide of his sister. According to McCarthy, this will feature a prominent female character. He also states that the new novel is "long".14 §Archivesedit The comprehensive archive of Cormac McCarthy's personal papers is preserved at the Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. The McCarthy papers consists of 98 boxes (46 linear feet).15The acquisition of the Cormac McCarthy Papers resulted from years of ongoing conversations between McCarthy and Southwestern Writers Collection founder, Bill Wittliff, who negotiated the proceedings.16 The Southwestern Writers Collection / Wittliff collections also holds The Wolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of letters between McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer,17 and four other related collections.18 §Personal lifeedit McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, one of six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy.19 In 1937, his family relocated to Knoxville, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.20 The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941 had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville (this latter house burned in 2009).21 Among his childhood friends was Jim Long (1930–2012), who would later be depicted as J-Bone in his novel Suttree.22 McCarthy attended St. Mary's Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School,23 and was an altar boy at the Church of the Immaculate Conception.22 He attended the University of Tennessee from 1951–52 and 1957–59 but never graduated. While at UT he published two stories in The Phoenix and was awarded the Ingram Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, they "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There they had a son, Cullen, in 1962. While caring for the baby and tending to the chores of the house, Lee was asked by Cormac to also get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.24 His novel Suttree is written with a deep knowledge of revelry and its proponents, making it seem semi-autobiographical. One would think that the author himself is a big drinker, but in an interview with Richard B. Woodward from The New York Times, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.'" His former life may provide some insight to his long list of introspectively shameful characters.25 McCarthy lived in the Tesuque, New Mexico area, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. McCarthy and Jennifer divorced in 2006. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."11 McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club.26 As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview, he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. McCarthy told Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks." In October 2007, Time published a conversation between McCarthy and the Coen brothers, on the eve of their adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.27 During the conversation, McCarthy talked about his taste in cinema, claiming he's "not that big a fan of exotic foreign films" and citing Five Easy Pieces and Days of Heaven as "good movies" while praising the Coens' own Miller's Crossing as "a very, very fine movie". Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he's "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible."28 As reported in Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which he had owned since buying it in a Knoxville pawnshop for $50 in 1963, was put up for auction at Christie's in 2009. McCarthy estimates he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The Olivetti was auctioned on December 4, 2009, and the auction house estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500.29 Its replacement is another Olivetti, bought for McCarthy by his friend John Miller for $11.30 The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization. §Familyedit ; Children * Cullen McCarthy (born 1962), son (with Lee Holleman)31 * John Francis McCarthy, (born 1998) son (with Jennifer Winkley) ; Marriages * Lee Holleman, (1961-1962) * Annie DeLisle, (1967–1981) * Jennifer Winkley (1997–2006) §Awardsedit * 1959, 1960 Ingram-Merrill awards * 1965 Traveling Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters * 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel for The Orchard Keeper11 * 1969 Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing * 1981 MacArthur Fellowship10 * 1992 National Book Award for Fiction3 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses * 1996 IMPAC Award longlist for The Crossing * 2000 IMPAC Award longlist for Cities of the Plain * 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and Believer Book Award for The Road * 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road2 * 2007 IMPAC Award shortlist for No Country for Old Men * 2008 Maltese Falcon Award, Japan, for No Country for Old Men * 2008 Premio Ignotus for The Road * 2008 IMPAC Award longlist for The Road * 2008 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, for a career whose writing "possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature." * 2012 Best of the James Tait Black, shortlist, The Road3233 §Film and television adaptationsedit * The Gardener's Son (airdate January 1977) was broadcast as part of a series for PBS. McCarthy wrote the screenplay upon request for director Richard Pearce.34 * McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses was made into a 2000 film directed by Billy Bob Thornton, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. * McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men (2005) was adapted into a 2007 Academy Award-winning film directed by the Coen brothers and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and Javier Bardem. * A 2009 film based on the novel The Road began development in 2007. John Hillcoat directed this adaptation by Joe Penhall.35 The leading roles include Viggo Mortensen as the father,36 Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy, Charlize Theron as the wife,37 and Robert Duvall as the old man. The film opened on November 25, 2009 to mostly positive reviews.38 * An adaptation of McCarthy's play The Sunset Limited (2006) aired on HBO in February 2011, starring Tommy Lee Jones (who also directs) and Samuel L. Jackson.39 * A film adaptation of Blood Meridian has been rumored for years; James Franco, Todd Field, Scott Rudin, and Ridley Scott have been connected at one point or another to the project, which has fallen through at least twice.4041 * A film adaptation of McCarthy's third novel Child of God, directed by James Franco, premiered at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2013.42 §Published worksedit §Novelsedit * The Orchard Keeper (1965) ISBN 0-679-72872-4 * Outer Dark (1968) ISBN 0-679-72873-2 * Child of God (1973) ISBN 0-679-72874-0 * Suttree (1979) ISBN 0-679-73632-8 * Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) ISBN 0-679-72875-9 * All the Pretty Horses (1992) ISBN 0-679-74439-8 * The Crossing (1994) ISBN 0-679-76084-9 * Cities of the Plain (1998) ISBN 0-679-74719-2 * No Country for Old Men (2005) ISBN 0-375-70667-4 * The Road (2006) ISBN 0-307-38789-5 * The Passenger (unpublished)43 §Short fictionedit * Wake for Susan (1959)44 * A Drowning Incident (1960)45 §Screenplaysedit * The Gardener's Son (1976) ISBN 0-88001-481-4 * The Sunset Limited (2011) * The Counselor (2013)46 §Playsedit * The Stonemason (1995) ISBN 978-0-679-76280-5 * The Sunset Limited (2006) ISBN 0-307-27836-0 Category:1933 births